The Playlist

Songs have long been a part of Cal Tri lore, and are an integral part of our successes over the past years. Each year, the team invariably adopts certain songs as unofficial mottos for the year, and as a result these songs become forever immortalized in the Team Playlist.

[rotating iTunes feed]

2007-2008:

World Hold On (need story)

Stronger – Kanye West. In the glorious season of 2007-2008, the California Triathlon team adopted a Kanye-inspired, stunna shades (PICTURE LINK) look as their theme for Nationals. It must have been a good omen, because Cal Tri went Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger than anyone else in the nation, racking up the awards and winning our first ever Overall Team National Champions.

2008-2009:

Infinity (need story)

Beggin (?)

2009-2010

Yes – LMFAO. “Everyday I see my dream” … words that Cal Tri lived and died by in the ’09-’10 season. Cal Tri turned up the swag by adopting a hot-pink theme to their apparel and jerseys this year. Understandably, when you’re already this ridiculously, good-looking and you throw hot pink into the mix, it really is “hard to be humble”. With another year of successes at Nationals – this time in Lubbock, Texas – the team was poppin’, rockin’, shockin’ and showed no signs of stoppin’ their dominance of the collegiate triathlon scene.

2010-2011

Teenage Dream – Katy Perry. Invariably when you send pack 60 triathletes into cars and ship them off for a 10-hour drive to sunny San Diego (see Winter Tri Camp), a lot of singing (screaming?) takes place. Our fearless, charismatic leader of the trip was then-Training VP Brandt Champion and since whatever he said (or sung) was taken as holy word, we ended up rollin’ down the windows and belting out Katy in our best falsettos all the way down the 101. This song was especially popular with our elderly (read as: Grad and PhD students), who truly felt like they were reliving the glorious teenage years by hanging around with the young’ins.

Just as Katy predicted, the team went “all the way” and had “no regrets”, taking 3rd Overall at Collegiate Nationals 2011 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

2011-2012

Sexy and I Know It – LMFAO

For better or for worse, 2011-2012 was unofficially the Year of the Curves. In fact, not since the good ol’ days of Kenny Rakestraw at Wildflower (PICTURE) can one remember speedos being such an integral part of the team’s existence. The team paid homage to this fact, as well as the accentuating, aero uniforms that year, by adopting Sexy and We Know It as the team motto. Speedos adorned the hips of Cal Triathletes all over the country that year; for example, on the peak of Mt. Diablo for the Pro Cycling Tour of California (picture, story link). Cal Tri received much publicity for this (all of it good of course) and became a much more recognizable face in the greater Bay Area sports scene. The speedo extravaganza was capped off by a West Coast Conference flash-mob to LMFAO’s hit at the Awards Ceremony for Collegiate Nationals 2012 (youtube).

Cal Tri is extremely sexy – we knew it before, and now the rest of the world does too.